Three Anecdotes on Writing
An acquaintance and I were having a conversation about writing, and it prompted me to share three personal anecdotes involving bestselling author Dan Millman (author of 17 books, including Way of the Peaceful Warrior). I would like to share them with you here as well, for shared benefit.
About ten years ago, I had dabbled in some writing but felt it was no good. I told Dan how I would sometimes write entire pages, only to then throw them away — surely there was the proof of my poor writing abilities. He laughed! Today, of course, I know that this process (of throwing out stuff) is part and parcel of the art of writing: author Ray Bradbury says that “writing consists of two phases: throwing up and cleaning up.”
Years later, he told me he had to throw out an entire third of his superb novel, The Journey of Socrates — the one that made me cry rivers of tears — after his daughter Sierra told him that that part needed to go. It amounted to hundreds of pages.
Another time — this was while I was in the thick of writing Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World — I told him how I felt my progress was really slow and tedious and that I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere with it. He looked me straight in the eye and said:
“Martin, there’s only one way to write: your way.”
In The Creative Compass, Dan and his daughter Sierra Prasada talk about the five stages of all creative endeavors, including writing: Dream, Draft, Develop, Refine, and Share.
Many people — myself included — often jump from Draft to Refine and skip over the Develop phase. I did that with a self-published precursor to my book Land: Dan read that precursor and said it wasn’t ready for publication. Hearing Dan say that was tough to receive: by that point I had already spent years on the book and was ready to be done with it.
But I had skipped an important step: If to Refine means to prune, like cutting the leaves of a Bonsai tree, to Develop means to hack entire branches off of a large tree. My book still had had paragraphs and pages in it that shouldn’t have been there, or that were in the wrong places. So I went back to the drawing board for another half year and reduced the book by about a third in size — I gutted out anything that was non-essential, and put a lot of material into the endnotes. Soon after, it was taken up by my wonderful non-profit publisher, North Atlantic Books, and the rest is… the eternal present.
MARTIN ADAMS is a social innovator, systems thinker, and community organizer. As a child, it pained him to see most people struggling while a few were living in opulence. This inspired in him a lifelong quest to create a fair and sustainable world in collaboration with others. As a young adult, groomed for a career in finance, he opted not to pursue a career on Wall Street and chose instead to dedicate his life to community enrichment. Through his non-profit work, he saw firsthand the extent to which our economic system causes human and ecological strife. Consequently, Martin devoted himself to the development of a new economic paradigm that might allow humanity to thrive in harmony with nature. His book Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World is the fruit of his years of research into a part of this economic model; its message stands to educate policymakers and changemakers worldwide. You can also follow Martin via social media: Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud.
